Sunday, July 19, 2009

Michel Ciment

"It always seemed to me that these interviews, recorded in the1970s with two of the greatest American directors of their generation, could be read "in a mirror" - to the extent that their parallel destinies reveal points of convergence and divergence.

"Kazan and Losey were born in the same year, 1909, from milieus that could not have been more different. Their respective origins, the Greek minority in Turkey and the world of carpets for one, an old patrician and protestant family for the other, explain in part the choices they made during the era of the Black List, a desire for social integration for Kazan, affirmation of the values of the Constitution for Losey. They both studied at the most elite universities of the East Coast, Yale and Harvard, they joined the communist party, and met with their first artistic success with theater productions in the 1930s. Their first films are marked by their social and political engagements dating from the New Deal before they gravitated toward films more focused on the ambiguities and the complexity of the human soul. They would thus both collaborate with Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter. Kazan's first great critical success was America, America, the same year, or almost, that Losey would know his first international acclaim with The Servant. And of course the dividing line was established by the witch hunts, with the denunciations of one and the exile of the other to Europe.

"Their lives never again crossed, but they had, as they aged, the same mistrust with regard to overly established certitudes."